Devil in the Dollhouse by Richard Kadrey

Author:Richard Kadrey [Kadrey, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2012-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

Don’t miss the continuing

exploits of Sandman Slim.

(Or he will do horrible things to you.)

Devil Said Bang

Richard Kadrey

Coming Fall 2012

“Me and the Devil Blues”

“Devil’s Stompin’ Ground”

“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”

“Don’t Shake Me, Lucifer”

“Hell Is Around the Corner”

“Hellnation”

“Up Jumped the Devil”

I punch the tunes into the jukebox and make sure it’s turned up loud. I’ve loaded up the juke with a hundred or so devil tunes. The Hellion Council can’t stand it when I come to a meeting with a pocketful of change. Wild Bill, the bartender, hates it too, but he’s a damned soul I recruited for the job, so he gets why I do it. I head back to the table and nod to him. He shakes his head and goes back to cleaning glasses.

Les Baxter winds down a spooky “Devil Cult” as I sit down with the rest of Hell’s ruling council. We’ve been here in the Bamboo House of Dolls for a couple of hours. My head hurts from reports, revised timetables, and learned opinions. If I didn’t have the music to annoy everyone with, I would probably have killed them all by now.

Buer slides a set of blueprints in my direction.

Hellions look sort of like the little demons in that Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Some look pretty human. Some look like the green devils on old absinthe bottles. Some are like what monsters puke up after a long weekend of eating other monsters. Buer looks like a cuttlefish in a Hugo Boss suit and smells like a pet-store Dumpster.

“What do you think of the colonnades?” he asks.

“The colonnades?”

“Yes. I redesigned the colonnades.”

“What the fuck are colonnades?”

General Semyazah, the supreme commander of Hell’s legions, sighs and points to a line of pillars at the center of the page. “That is a colonnade.”

“Ah.”

If the hen scratchings on the blueprints are different from the last bunch of hen scratchings Buer showed me, I sure as hell can’t tell. I say the first thing that pops into my head.

“Were those statues there before?”

Buer waves his little cuttlefish tentacles and moves his finger across the paper.

“They’re new. A different icon for each of the Seven Noble Virtues.”

He’s not lying. They’re all there. All the personality quirks that give Hellions a massive cultural hard-on. Cunning. Ruthlessness. Ferocity. Deception. Silence. Strength. Joy. They’re represented by a collection of demonic marble figures with leathery wings and forked tongues, bent spines and razor dorsal fins, clusters of eyestalks and spider legs. The colonnades look like the most fucked-up miniature golf course in the universe and they’re on what’s supposed to be the new City Hall.

“I have an idea. How about instead of the Legion of Doom we put up the Rat Pack and the lyrics to ‘Luck Be a Lady’?”

“Excuse me?” says Buer.

“What I mean is, it looks a little fascist.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

I push the blueprints away with the sharpened fingers of my left hand, the ugly prosthetic one on my ugly prosthetic arm.

Buer doesn’t know how to react.

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